Monday, July 06, 2009

It's Official:

There is something out there on the intarwebz that is more disgusting than two girls, one cup.

I saw it about an hour ago, and it makes me want to hit puppies, go clubbing with baby seals, waterboard starving kids in Africa, and nuke Alaska.

That's right. I'm talking about Sarah Palin's resignation speech.

She has the unfathomable ability to make me kind of-sort of not think George W. Bush is the biggest fucktard in the history of retarded fucktards.

Aside from her total butchery of the English language (which is a point I'll get to momentarily), she has the audacity to have yet another totally pointless press conference.

Note to Sarah: the election is over. You are not running for anything anymore. Except maybe the 2012 presidential spot. But I don't believe that the GOP (btw, random tangent here: GOP stands for Grand Old Party. I know that no one under 30 gets that, but seriously, how the fuck are you going to appeal to the masses with that as your moniker? Or are you just not going to try?) will let you do that because you are the most incapable human being to ever be elected to any office.

Given the attention she's already gotten, I don't think I can say much that's new here.

But let's look for a second at the content of the speech.

I once spent a warm morning in Houston at Rice University for my older brother's commencement. The elder of the two Bush disasters that someone elected spoke at the ceremony. It was pretty fun from my vantage. I got to see all kinds of professors roll their eyes and nod off to sleep as much as possible because––oh! did I mention this? Rice U insists on having the ceremony outside.

Outdoors, Houston, Texas. It all amounts to miserable heat and mosquitos. Bad mosquitos. I haven't yet gotten a chance to quantitatively compare the hugeness and irritatingness of the mosquitos in Houston v. the mosquitos in Bemidji. But a very anecdotal assessment tells me that they are about the same. Not impressed, MN.

Bush 41. He stood there and recapped the SNL/Dana Carvey skit that had already been aired. Thousand points of Light, Stay the Course, No new Taxes, Read my Lips (no, that's not Lisa Lipps. She's much more interesting.)

But in his own (what I am going to call disgusting) oeuvre, it made a certain sense. He wasn't just saying things that had no meaning, or had no underlying substrate that couldn't be isomorphically mapped onto a meaningful analogue. What he was saying made a certain amount of sense if given a high enough level of meaning.

I don't really want to dwell too much on where exactly that level of meaning engages us because I suspect that it's at too low a level to have any pertinence.

He was, on some level, able to get some people to envision themselves as something other than themselves. Something positive. That's the power of imagery that, for example, 43 doesn't have. That's the power of imagery that Sarah Palin doesn't have.

But her lack is much worse than either of the Bushes. (We're going to pretend that there's no pun there because I said so.)

There are multiple levels of processing information, and let's face it: understanding language is the processing of data. Let's call the lower level the syntactic level. And since we're assigning levels, let's call the higher level the semantic level.

Obviously, Bush 43 has no clue about the syntactic understanding of language. 41 at least had that. But 41 also had something else: he at least had a slightly higher level of semantic understanding than his son.

He was able to say things that were evocative of higher levels of meaning even if he was rather pedantic about them. 43, on the other hand, missed out on every possible instance of that higher meaning.

Sarah Palin takes a bit from both: She misses out on any syntactic meaning, and simultaneously parrots 41 with repetitions of things that sound like semantic statements, but ultimately have no meaning of either kind because she has no ability to frame anything in a meaningful context.

In other words, she's a linguistic idiot. She's a dolt.

And she's an incoherent dolt: the first person in recent history to make Dan Quale look smrt.

So. Why am I writing about this? The media is all over it. We've all been painfully exposed to what an complete fool she is. Why write about it now?

Maybe it's because I can't resist beating up the retarded girl who lives down the street. Maybe it's because someone needs to tell people how completely retarded she is. Maybe it's because I'm just mean-spirited.

But mostly, I think it's because I take Sarah Palin seriously and as an insult. Maybe it's because I'm a member of a cooperative society and that some other members have decided that she can govern. And they elected her. And they are a part of the country I live in.

I don't know about you (oh you sweet 4 readers that I have), but when I think of Sarah Palin, I feel like someone I don't know, that I don't normally care about, that I wouldn't in a million years allow to represent me . . . has forced a representative down my unpatriotic throat. That really pisses me off.

I don't want anyone in this world or that world or the third world or the next world thinking that I would ever participate in a social contract that allowed a total fucking idiot like Sarah Palin to get elected to do anything.

Maybe I'm not so pissed at Alaska after all. Maybe I just want to eat a bullet for being a U.S. Citizen.

I'm embarrassed. Even more so than I was over 8 years of 43.

Here's an addendum that I hope to keep brief:

Law is written in language. There are both syntactic and semantic meanings that we have to deal with. But law deals with both. This is the whole idea behind a strict constructionist v. a more intuition-driven idea of the constitution.

What did the individual words mean at the time? What was the intent of the framers? What was the higher-level of meaning?

This issue of language and context is at the heart of how we form our political opinions and how we ultimately elect our representatives. Part of that is that we trust that our representatives at least understand what the linguistic issues are, and at least attempt to deal with them in a reasonable way.

This promise of trust is what is so disturbing about 43 and Palin. There's a total disregard for any semblance of decent understanding of the language of the law. We need fewer politicians and more linguists.